While I do try to see a new movie every weekend, sometimes things come up that keep me from doing so. This past weekend, I had plans, the new releases either didn’t grab me (no thanks, Arthur the King), or they were playing at inconvenient times given my weekend plans. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t knock out something on a streaming service. As such, my movie for the weekend, watched on St. Patrick’s Day no less…was not the slightest bit Irish. I instead opted with another entry from my Fill-in Filmography over on The Criterion Channel and finally watch a Japanese movie that was neither directed by Akira Kurosawa nor featured a giant monster stomping through Tokyo.
Oddly enough, despite the title, the movie I selected was not really about Sansho the Bailiff. He’s actually more of a villainous presence and not even one that has a lot of screentime. It’s almost akin to naming the first Star Wars after Darth Vader or maybe Grand Moff Tarkin.
After the opening text tells the audience that the story is set in feudal times before people really treated each other like human beings, the movie opens to see a mother and her two children traveling to find the children’s exiled father. Flashbacks reveal the father was the one-time governor of a province. When the army came to draft many of the farmers of his district to fight in a war, he resisted because it was harvest time, the people had been starving around there for years, and taking the men away would only make things worse. While his people love him, defying the Imperial military is the sort of thing that can and does end in exile for the governor. Before he goes, he advices first his son Zushiō (Yoshiaki Hanayagi as an adult) and then his younger daughter Anju (Kyōko Kagawa as an adult) to always remember all people are born equal and to show mercy to everyone except themselves, traits that will allow his children to live up to a very high standard worthy of their rank and birth.
However, things go bad when, years later, the mother and children are tricked while traveling to find the father. The mother Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka) and an older maid are taken away to be sold into prositution in one district while the two children, Zushiō in his mid-teens at most, are sold to the estate of the brutal Sanshō (Eitarō Shindō). These kids are both too young and not used to the hard labor that Sanshō puts his slaves through, with only Sanshō’s kindhearted son Tarō (Akitake Kōno) offering them any assistance at all. As the children grow to adulthood, will Zushiō remember his father’s lessons? He is responsible for his younger sister, after all. As Tamaki is far away, their father somewhere else, and Zushiō and Anju living in the harshest of estates as slaves, there may be little cause for hope for this family. Can they escape?
As I was watching this, quite frankly, beautiful movie, I was mostly wondering what sort of story I was looking at. Sansho the Bailiff was apparently based on a 1915 short story that had, itself, been a part of a long oral tradition before it was written down. I do wonder if the lines about all men being born equal weren’t at least a little influenced by the (by then over) American occupation, but this movie’s plot did have all the elements of a fairy tale without any sort of magic while at the same time not making what happens out to be a happy ending for this family. Sanshō’s estate is a horrible place to live, a place where escape seems impossible to the point that Zushiō seems to decide to just fit in the best he can after a while. On the one hand, this movie has a largely tragic ending for many of the characters involved.
On the other hand, it also seems to reinforce the nameless father’s advice. Zushiō will do as his father advised, but is it all for naught? The movie seems to suggest that, in time of deep misery and inhumanity as seen by men like Sanshō, men who take advantage of the law to be as cruel as they want to be, that when people do things like show mercy and make life better for others to the best of their ability, that may be enough. Maybe Zushiō won’t get the happy ending with his sister and parents that he wants, but he can do what he can to bring down the likes of Sanshō and at least live up to his father’s legacy while making life better for other people, even if he can’t bring any such happiness to himself.
Grade: A
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